[arealconservativeforachange]

The 6k nuts will be by to scream blasphemy.

[JennysCool]

Ping!

[DieHard the Hunter]

WOW. This is mind-blowing stuff, and entirely plausible. Amazing carvings, ay — particularly for something 13,000 years old!

This is straight out of the days of Conan the Barbarian, in the Hyperborean Age.

[VeniVidiVici]

There were herds of game, rivers of fish, and flocks of wildfowl; lush green meadows were ringed by woods and wild orchards. About 10,000 years ago, the Kurdish desert was a 'paradisiacal place', as Schmidt puts it. So what destroyed the environment? The answer is Man.

I'd say it's just as likely that the retreating glaciers changed the climate here to that of Saudi Arabia.

[ansel12]

This is a fascinating article, if someone has links I would like to read more about this.

That part about the massive covering up of the site seemed unusual that is a lot of labor.

[eclecticEel]

humanity's innocent and leisured hunter-gatherer past, when we could pluck fruit from the trees, scoop fish from the rivers and spend the rest of our days in pleasure

Ho-ha, someone has a sense of humor at least. Why we should all just up and become hunter-gatherers; since it's such a paradisiacal mode of living. And I just love the little bit of rhetorical projection at the end; paradise was lost because of ...

... wait for it ...

... human caused climate change! Who could have guessed?

[Richard Kimball]

Fascinating article. I've always believed we short-change our ancestors in terms of their knowledge. I think their societies were far more sophisticated than we believe.

[this_ol_patriot]

Awesome and eerie. Click on the photo at the link below for some extraordinary pics.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html#

[Boanarges]

Thanks for posting. That was extremely interesting and something I knew nothing about. Good read!

[B-Chan]

Wow. Stunning story, fantastic post.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a 'temple in Eden', built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors - people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.

It's a stunning and seductive idea. Yet it has a sinister epilogue. Because the loss of paradise seems to have had a strange and darkening effect on the human mind. A few years ago, archaeologists at nearby Cayonu unearthed a hoard of human skulls. They were found under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood.

Will the nonsense spawned by that idiot Rousseau EVER stop??

Man was never a "noble savage" living in harmony in a state of nature and at peace with his fellow man and environment, only to be "ruined" by society and civilization.

This idiocy was picked up by Marx who claimed that the development of human society had "alienated" man from his wonderful noble primitive self and we need communism to get back to the state of supposed wonderfulness. It's been the constant drumbeat of the Left ever since.

Hobbes and Locke got it right; Rousseau and Marx, not so much.

[TXnMA]

Ping to some interesting archaeology -- with or without the religious interpretation applied in the article.

Good (and interesting) photos at the link, too...

[zot]

Ping to some interesting archeology, although the author’s pontificating is tiresome.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

The odd beak and head on the bird in that particular carving calls to mind the Dodo bird.

[dr_who]

Whatever the answer, the parallels with our own era are stark. As we contemplate a new age of ecological turbulence, maybe the silent, sombre, 12,000-year-old stones of Gobekli Tepe are trying to speak to us, to warn us, as they stare across the first Eden we destroyed.

Gaia worship barf alert. This isn't what I would call objective journalism.

[ansel12]

This is an odd thread, it is such a great article and the link down thread to the national geographic article about this find was very good also, unfortunately I get the impression that only a few people read either article.

[Misterioso]

I took this article to be on the level, until the last paragraph. Now I realize it’s from “The Onion.”

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

If this is the garden of Eden, where’s the conniving talking snake’s descendents?

Only idiots believe Eden / Adam / Eve to have been real. Serves them for believing in Stone-Age mythology.

[count-your-change]

The piece had to get that little “man changes climate” bit in there. Of course.

[grey_whiskers]

My bullshit detector started spiking after several paragraphs.

My personal suspicion is that Geraldo did it with help from the crop-circle aliens.

Cheers!